The Scottish Islanders

 Get your copy from www.shop.yachtarchive.scot !

A great review in Marine Quarterly!

 

The Scottish Islanders is selling very well via social media, but it's fantastic to get a positive review!

The best way to get a copy is via the online link directly to the publishers, Scottish Yachting Archives, although for those who prefer one-click buying, it's also on Amazon.

Memorial to Iain Oughtred, Boatbuilder and Inspiration

 

Iain Oughtred was born in 1939 and grew up in Sydney. He was a shy child, who didn’t enjoy his studies, but from early on he developed a fascination with aeroplanes and boats and the science around them. He became involved in racing the National Gwen dinghies that were a feature of the scene on the Harbour. These were flat bottomed racing boats, designed in 1942, with a hull just twelve feet long, weighing just ten stone (63.5 kg), but with the foresail on a bowsprit and what Iain called a “shy spinnaker” set on a ten foot pole, giving them a massive sail area and requiring incredible skill to keep them from turning over. By the 1950s the postwar availability of new glues and synthetic sailcloth increased the performance, so that he claimed, in an article he wrote in 1958, that one had been timed at 23 mph in a “gale-like wind”. He built seven of them and became the class champion. His long term friends knew him as Isig, from the number on his sail created from black tape.

After working for several yacht designers, in 1964 the lure of the Swinging Sixties brought Iain to London, where he established his own practice in his own distinctive style. There was at that time a huge interest in self-built sailing boats, led by the Daily Mirror sponsoring Barry Bucknell’s Mirror Dinghy at the 1963 Boat Show. Iain knew that a self-build need not resemble a shoe box and started putting out drawings of  hulls that were lovely as well as fast and seaworthy, accompanied by detailed building manuals, ensuring that anyone with the most basic skills could build one. His fascination with Viking designs led to his move to Scotland and then to Bernisdale on Skye, twenty three years ago. There he was truly in his element, working in his boat shaped drawing office and eventually reaching over a hundred designs. He’s best known for one of his last ones, for the community-built Scottish Coastal Rowing skiffs, with over two hundred in Scotland and almost the same number elsewhere. 

Iain was a quiet, deeply spiritual person, who invariably put others before himself. He was reluctant to embrace the internet, preferring to develop a personal connection with his clients, always available to take a call to resolve a problem. His drawings were works of art, invariably sent with a handwritten note adorned with tiny sketches. 

There is no easy way to leave this life, but it was a relief to know that Iain’s final few weeks were made as comfortable as possible in the brand new Broadford Hospital. His good friend and neighbour, Natalie Steele, had insisted on his being shifted from the back to the front of the building, with a view over Broadford Bay. As cards began to arrive from the boatbuilding and coastal rowing communities who owed him so much, and it turned out that one of the hospital staff was even building one of his boats, he was recognised as someone very special indeed. Although beyond the reach of any potential treatment, he was in no pain whatsoever, and so remained fully alert and cheerful. 

In his final days Iain had visits from his son, Haig, over from Lisbon, and his brother David, from Hawaii (what an international family!), also from many friends within easier travelling distance. Then in the morning of 22nd February we got word that he had quietly passed away during the night.

I understand that, by the time you read this, a quiet Quaker service will have taken place on Skye. I suspect that his sailing and rowing friends here and abroad will organise their own events later in the year. And, to preserve his legacy, a group of friends, with the agreement of his family, will be setting up a small charity to ensure that his designs live on and continue to support the tradition, culture and skills of which he was such a keen advocate.

The Scottish Islanders

 

It’s been great fun, and quite emotional at times, getting feedback from people who’ve read The Scottish Islanders. Stories have come in from sailors, including one telling me how her parents met through Jura and she now reads excerpts to her dad in his care home. The book’s not just for the old folk though. There are chapters dealing with approaches to saving the life of an old boat and even building a replica with modern materials, that should encourage those with energy to take on the challenge.

There are also some tales from the west coast, which should provide a nice read once you’re at anchor, and the book should sit nicely on a yacht’s shelf.

Because my publisher friends at the Scottish Yachting Archives decided on a high quality print, there isn’t a sufficient margin to put the book into bookshops and still cover the production costs, so marketing is entirely via social media on sites such as this, and huge thanks are due to admins. We’ve also had some excellent reviews, including the current month’s Classic Boat.

If you’ve already read the book, think about posting a review on Amazon. It’s listed there, but the best way to get a copy is via the publisher’s online shop directly,

shop.yachtarchive.scot

 

The Scottish Islanders in Classic Boat

I'm truly excited that Classic Boat Magazine has carried a nice review of my book in their March edition, following another yachting magazine, Watercraft, who were very quick of their mark. There have been reviews in a couple of newspapers, the Oban Times and the National, and also in the February edition of Scottish Field. To get a mention in the most widely read yachting publication is quite special.

For anyone who doesn't already know, writing the Scottish Islanders was a labour of love that took about a dozen years, but the research for it really went back fifty years to when I first started to explore the coastline and islands of Argyll and further afield. In May 1974 I sailed a small open boat, single handed, from Dumbarton round to Oban, where I’d rented a mooring at the Brandystone in front of Donnie Currie’s house at the south side of the bay.

Two years later I acquired Stroma, Scottish Islander number four. They were a fleet of identical basic racing yachts launched from 1929 onwards. She was just about seaworthy, and in those early days of the craze for plastic yachts very affordable, because old wooden boats could hardly be given away. She was an improvement on the open boat, with a basic cabin. She was mine for over four decades, during which she went into a serious decline, which was not entirely my own fault, followed by recovery, when I rebuilt her over eight years. She is now sailed by new owners, who like me were in their twenties when they took her over. Unlike me, they have now produced a crew, who one hopes will eventually help their parents handle the sheets and pull up the anchor.

During my custodianship I gathered a huge amount of information about the Islanders. In the years before the war they were sailed by some of Glasgow’s best known business families, who abandoned their home comforts each weekend to race against each other, regardless of the weather, sometimes the only fleet seen out on the Firth of Clyde. Their antics excited interest far beyond the yachting fraternity and were eagerly covered in the national press. It was fascinating to find that the mothers and daughters were often among the most competitive, and my researches unearthed some truly surprising stories. Here’s a quote from a Press interview in 1934:

“Do you think,” I continued, “that yachting is good sport for women?”

“The best in the world,” she laughed. “But you’ve got to take it seriously. It’s no use thinking you can only go out on nice days, and sit around the deck looking smart in trousers.”

The story of this remarkable young woman is one of the real highlights in the book. Her family allowed me access to her sailing diary, and photographs such as this one, the long skirt signalling that a woman can work a foredeck as well as any man.

The book moves on to describe the return of the survivors of those families post war, followed by a story of decline, and eventual recovery, when the Scottish Islanders survived in the hands of people who just wanted to sail and who appreciated craftsmanship, style and seaworthiness. Their survival has provided colourful tales of exploits and excursions, as new generations of sailors, very different from the original group, continue to discover the fun of exploring the west coast of Scotland.

I’ve added a photograph of Stroma racing off the Isle of Kerrera in West Highland Week in 2004, with myself and my pals the horseman John Wilson and the late Paddy Shaw aboard. The oldest yacht in the fleet, she won that race easily and we only failed to take the overall prize for the week because we’d spent a day in the Mishnish hotel in Tobermory.

The best way to acquire a copy of the book is on the direct link to the publisher's online shop. It's also on Amazon, but they make a significant deduction, which is painful, given the production cost of a high quality publication, with a small print run. Copies are already available in several marinas, Kip, Largs, Ardfern, Craobh Haven and Dunstaffnage to date, with more to come as we get around. here's the link:

https://www.shop.yachtarchive.scot

Arresting a Ship

I’ve managed to do very little sailing this year, with only one overnight stop, in a favourite spot, which I’ve often posted about, Toberonochy

But in other ways it’s been one of the most fascinating seasons yet.

At the beginning of the summer, Anne and I got a rather mysterious message from Switzerland asking us to keep the last week in July free, with further instructions to come. Then came another invitation, to one of Scotland’s most interesting and historic corners, Roshven, close to Ardnamurchan.

It’s not every day that you get invited to the hundredth birthday of a boat, in fact it’s only happened to me once before, see here, The Story of the Scottie

To celebrate the occasion, I wrote the story behind it. Here goes!

Ceann Tràgha

Kentra is the anglicised form of two Scots Gaelic words. Ceann means a head, while tràigh, here in its genitive form tràgha, can mean a number of things, such as a shore, a  strand or a bay. Thus Kentra means “Head of the Bay” and is the name of a bay with astonishingly large mud flats when the tide is out. This part of Scotland has an interesting history and is known in Gaelic as Na Garbh-chrìochan, “the Rough Bounds”. Not far from Kentra Bay, on a little island, are the ruins of an Caisteal Tioram, “the dry castle”, dating back to the time of the first Lord of the Isles, Somerled, who ruled in the Twelfth Century. 

King Somerled in an angry mood

The castle was burnt and destroyed during the first Jacobite Rebellion in 1715. Happily, the area is a safer place to visit today! 

Kentra’s first owner, Kenneth Clark, a member of the Coats/Clark Paisley cotton dynasty, bought the Ardnamurchan estate in 1916, a huge slice of land that stretched from the River Shiel right across to the westmost point of the British mainland, and which included Kentra Bay on its northern shoreline. The estate included Glenborrodale Castle, then quite a modern, late Victorian, red sandstone building, finished in 1901. He lived in slightly smaller accommodation at Shielbridge House, on the banks of the River Shiel and used the castle mainly for socialising, when it wasn’t let out to people such as Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Thomas Sopwith. His visitors included King George V in his yacht Britannia. 

In 1916 he provided the local community with the Shielbridge Hall, a community facility, which is still in use. After his death in 1933 the estate was sold. Glenborrodale Castle has since been used sometimes as an hotel and sometimes as a private house, but Shielbridge House was demolished by a later owner in the 1950s, after the government introduced a tax on very large houses and many estate owners decided to destroy their properties rather than pay it.

Kenneth Clark also had houses in the South of England and on the Riviera, which probably suited his busy lifestyle as a sportsman and a gambler rather better than the quiet west coast of Scotland. Was he truly “the Man who broke the Bank in Monte Carlo”? Perhaps not, as it seems that the title should go to Charles de Ville Wells, who died in 1922. 

It must remain a puzzle why such a fellow as Kenneth Clark commissioned a true sea going sailing ship and, of course, we know that he sold her within a year. Perhaps he decided that his health wasn’t up to a round the world trip. Whatever his reason for commissioning Kentra, we owe him our thanks for one of William Fife’s most beautiful creations.

Arresting a Ship

By the time I first heard of Kentra, in the early 1990s, I had been running my law practice in the centre of  Glasgow for many years. Our office was situated in an historic building overlooking Royal Exchange Square, the heart of the old commercial sector. I enjoyed the pleasant working space too much to join one of the bigger law firms, and the autonomy gave me the freedom to decide what work I wanted to take on. 

Because people knew of my interest in ships and the sea, problems with a maritime flavour tended to come my way. These were rarely straightforward, but always interesting. I found myself advising a firm of deep sea divers who had bought the Fairlie Pier and through them I met Archie MacMillan, the final director of the Fife yard, where Kentra had been built. Archie even persuaded me to moor my own yacht, Stroma, at Fairlie for a few years, before the long stretch of mud at low tide eventually made me return to deeper waters.

Stroma at Crinan, 2008

One day my accountant friend, Bill Cameron, invited me to look at a problem that had arisen at the old McGruer yard at Clynder, not far from the Royal Northern Yacht Club base near Helensburgh. She had arrived in Scotland for renovation after a hard working life in the Mediterranean. Her latest owner, said to be a fellow in the olive oil business who lived in the Dakota Building in New York, had apparently disappeared, leaving a squad of skilled craftsmen and the yard’s owners looking for their money. To make matters more exciting, it was even rumoured that a certain Brigitte  Bardot had been sailing on her; one hopes that she would have taken her sharp heeled shoes off when she went aboard. What a wonderful case to land on my desk!

Among the things that attract young people to a career in the law are television programmes showing fantastically clever attorneys defending clients on terribly serious charges and getting them off due to their sheer brilliance, although also perhaps because, of course, the clients are always innocent. My equivalent ambitions, having been obsessed with boats and ships from an early age, were rather different. They included arresting ships by nailing writs to their masts, a  procedure which caused a sailing ship to be kept in port in foreign parts until all her bills had been settled. I never thought that I might end up doing this in practice, although as it turned out in my case, no nails were to be involved; indeed there was no mast on Kentra.

Arrestment is a procedure that has been around for ever and the rules surrounding it form one of the oldest parts of international maritime law. Problems that were first seen centuries years ago are in principle the same as today’s, when, for example, a container ship goes aground in the Suez Canal and incurs enormous charges. 

As I had never arrested a ship before, I started asking around and soon discovered that while an older lawyer friend had spent a lifetime working in shipping law and had occasionally secured an arrestment, the owner had always turned up with a payment to prevent his vessel being sold. With my friend’s help and a visit to the library we got the case started. It seemed that a mast was an essential part of the procedure, but the Sheriff at the court in Dumbarton confirmed that using sticky tape to attach the writ to any permanent part would suffice.

When the owner had failed to respond to various efforts to notify him the Sheriff ordered that Kentra be sold by public auction, to take place in the Commodore Hotel in Helensburgh, rather an appropriately named place. He had never granted such an order before and decided to set out some detailed rules, providing that there would be an upset price of twenty thousand pounds and bids would be throughout in units of one thousand. This was to guarantee in due course rather a long day!

A few days before the sale I had a telephone call from a Swiss gentleman who informed me that he intended to bid. Because of the obvious conflict of interest, as I was in a sense now acting for the court, I introduced him to a good friend, Graham Wilson, sadly no longer with us, who had served in the Royal Navy before becoming a lawyer and who lived in Helensburgh. When I first called Graham, he thought that I was joking, but the next call from Switzerland put him right.

On the appointed day the bidding went quickly up to £28,000, after which a well known local car dealer dropped out, then proceeded, in bids of one thousand pounds, until a major international brokerage firm gave up and Graham’s new client, Ernst, found himself not only with a yacht, but also a slice of heritage that has engaged him and Doris for the last three decades.

The sale produced sufficient funds to clear all the sums due to known creditors, but a few others now turned up and created problems which belong more appropriately to a textbook on insolvency law than here. I was greatly relieved to be able to pay the sale proceeds into the Sheriff Court and leave it to others to sort out who got what.

The new owners decided to have Kentra restored by Duncan Walker and his crew at Fairlie Restorations, who had already returned several other Fife masterpieces to life in their yard by the Hamble. To get her to Southampton was to involve a sea voyage the length of the West coast, round Land’s End, in late autumn. Being an empty hulk, there was no question of her travelling on her own keel. 

The legendary Harry Spencer of Cowes, the doyen of riggers worldwide, was contracted to handle the voyage on a special barge to be towed behind his private tug. The largest mobile crane in Scotland, belonging to Baldwins of Grangemouth was engaged and brought across from the far side of Scotland by Mr Baldwin in person.

 

Here we see  Duncan Walker, myself and Graham Wilson, on a cold, late Autumn morning, before the fun commenced.

This all took place on what I believe was Harry Spencer’s seventieth birthday in September 1995 and I imagine he was totally in his element, shown standing on the deck of Kentra in this photograph. 

The voyage south took, I’ve been told, a couple of weeks. Bad weather set in and the underwriters insisted on the journey being broken and days being spent in port before the final, risky, rounding of Land's End could take place. One suspects that Harry and his crew will have enlivened things in a few unsuspecting, remote taverns on the fringes of Wales. Happily all went well and Kentra was successfully delivered into the hands of Duncan and his crew at the Hamble.

I have borrowed this great image of Harry from the Cowes Heritage website.

I feel enormously privileged that a legal case thirty years ago has led to lasting friendships. 

The 1998 Fife Regatta

The first Fife Regatta in 1998 was an especially emotional experience for all of us, overshadowed by the loss of Eric Tabarly in the Irish Sea. With only a dozen or so yachts attending, the available spaces, such as the historic Kelburn Castle, had enough space to accommodate everyone as we came to terms with the sense of shock for all of us and personal grief for those who had known Eric. Later events have not quite managed to recreate the feelings of intimacy.

I was happy to be able to help Jimmy Houston with the organising and as a result managed to sign up in the French merchant navy to sail aboard Moonbeam for a couple of days, but the real delight was spending a day aboard Kentra in the Kyles of Bute.

Three days after my return to Argyll came the real surprise, thanks to that pink cap. There it was, bobbing along behind the hedge at the front of our garden, a hundred sea miles from the Firth of Clyde. Without anyone aboard knowing where we lived, not only Kentra, but  Pen Duick as well, were moored in a sheltered bay about a kilometre from our house!

Fearnach Bay, with its ancient pier, a relic from the days when the local industry was making gunpowder, has since become a favourite anchoring spot for Kentra.

A Feature of the West Coast

We are always very pleased to see Kentra and  are amazed at her people's tolerance of our Scottish weather, which often provides four seasons in one single day.

Last summer, I had headed off aboard my new little boat, Mariota, launched in 2019, with my good friends Margaret and Vicky. At the North of the Isle of Seil there is a well known anchorage, Puilladhobhran, “the Pool of the Otter”, which we tend to avoid, as it’s like a parking lot in summer, so we anchor in a more private spot. Once settled, we looked along the shore and, also avoiding the crowd, there was Kentra!

It’s wonderful to see Kentra in spectacular condition as she enters her second century and her present custodians have our grateful thanks for all you have done to bring this wonderful piece of heritage back to life. 

The Scottish Islanders

 

Above is a fantastic photograph of the fleet racing in the last major event before war put a stop to such things. When I was putting my book together, I was delighted at the support from companies such as Beken, who were content for me to use a portrait image of my own Islander, Stroma, without payment. This image isn't in the book, it came from someone whose forebears had purchased a copy at the time. Perhaps we'll eventually do a reprint.

The feedback from purchasers has been very positive, also I've been getting sent material, such as the photograph, also anecdotes about the boats and their families, which is making the whole exercise feel very worth while. There's a lot of social history that deserves to be recorded, not just regarding the older, rather patrician families, but also just about the characters who made the west coast and its little bays and havens a lot of fun. I'm thinking of men like Boyd Keen, who made it into the book, and the recently departed and much loved Cubby MacKinnon, about whom a book, Mistress and Commander, appeared a few years ago.

Seriously, the book is quite a limited print run, and it's selling quite well, via social media only, because the margin between cost and retail price rules out major bookshops. So, if you want a copy, or know someone whom you think might enjoy it, you can find the online shop at

www.shop.yachtarchive.scot